Happiness exploded: There’s more to positive emotions than you think

By Colin Shaw | Published: February 8, 2010

How do positive and negative emotions impact your Customer Experience?

Elevation, Gratitude and Admiration.
These are the three distinct “other praising” emotions separate from Happiness that have been found to elicit different positive behavioural responses, a recent study shows. Daniel R. Hawes blogs over at Evolved Primate that Positive emotions:
“broaden one’s perspective and motivate one to do things that will build skills or resources for the future”.
In contrast, negative emotions generally:
“narrow and focus one’s attention on the matter at hand to solve a problem”.
Think of the impact of these descriptions in regards to your organizations Customer Experience. Someone has a poor customer experience, their emotions influence their behaviour and they “narrow and focus” their attention on solving the problem – their altered emotional state. They may complain to the manager, moan to a friend or blog about it online. Whatever result, your brand is part of a negative story that extends beyond the initial poor customer experience.
Compare this to creating a positive Customer Experience, “broadening ones perspective and motivating one to do things that will build skills or resources for the future”. Provide customers with the tools and touch points to interact with your brand, and given a positive customer experience, they can express their improved emotional state. Coke’s Facebook Fan Page is possibly the best example of this. Their Facebook wall is an open book, anyone can write anything they want, yet 99% of comments are positive.
Is it no surprise that Coke’s brand message of recent years has been ‘Open Happiness’?

 

 

 

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Customer Experience in 2009 – did any banks deliver?

By Colin Shaw | Published: February 5, 2010

Bruce Temkin continues with his brilliant analysis of Forrester’s 2010 Customer Experience Index (CxPi).

 

 

This time he has split the report by banks, examining 13 banks out of the 133 organizations covered. Unsurprisingly, banks had a bad year. In times of economic hardship, when customers are relying on banks the most – they were delivered the worst possible customer experience. Unfortunately for a number of Customer Service managers in these organisations, there was little they could do due to following the strictest of policies.

However, is this not something that all of us as Customer Experience Strategists should be planning for? When the worst situation occurs, whats your plan for your organisations customer experience? Will you let your customer service fall down your priorities, lose your customers and have to start the whole cycle of acquisition and retention again? Or will you implement great customer experience now, protect yourself for future disasters and survive the worst due to your great customer loyalty?

It will be interesting to look back on this list in 2, 5 or 10 years and see how many of these organisations are still around.

Have a look at the Experience Matters blog to see the full table.

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Hidden Defectors in an Experience

By Steven Walden | Published: February 5, 2010

Following on from the earlier Blog on the concept of Silent Attrition, I thought I’d enclose what has been in the Customer Experience world quite a useful model. This is from Cherry Tree research and highlights the high defection rate from the ‘do not complain’ but had a poor experience segment! This is like the Convergys model and resonates highly within Social Media: especially when you think about how ‘do not complain’ can turn into ‘but I’ll talk about it any way in my Social Media.

One word of warning, Gartner has just released a useful article: Social Media is the New CRM.  To quote from the article placed on Mycustomer.com:

“More than 70% of all IT-led social media initiatives will fail over the next two years compared with about half of business-led ones, according to researchers Gartner.  This high failure rate is because organisations do not currently have the right skill sets in place to design and deliver such offerings, while the situation is also not helped by a dearth of suitable methodologies, technologies and tools to help them.”

In short, there is perhaps an Experience shortfall. Technologies maybe good at initially capturing interest but actually achieving engagement beyond the student facebook type approach, still falls far short of what is required.

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